Anton von Webern has proved pivotal in the history of Western art music, inspiring composers after him to find new forms of expression and to reach new levels of abstraction. But his music itself is very much an outgrowth of the emotional world of late Romanticism, richly expressive, often passionate. Working in the nascent world of atonality, as inspired by his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, Webern became a master of compression.

With one foot firmly in the kingdom of late Romantic music and the other pointing towards Webern’s later, more abstract, style, the Five Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5 represents the first step toward a distillation of the aesthetic of Wagner and Strauss.